Mislabelled Apple Hard Drives MK3253GSX MK1653GSX

I have a particularly nerdy Apple rabbit hole to share with you today involving the labels on Apple hard drives. At some point around 2007-2008 Apple started re-labelling the hard drives used in their computers. I’m pretty sure the hard drives in black & white MacBooks were standard white labels with an Apple part number (655-XXXX) printed on them. Now disks feature a black label with white text. Not particularly exciting, but maybe somebody (Jony?) wanted the disks to match the fancy black circuit boards now used in all Apple hardware. That’s the sort of attention to detail we’ve come to love from Apple devices. Whatever the reason, this has resulted in a batch of Toshiba drives in circulation with incorrect information printed on them. I assume these are the result of a simple ⌘+C, ⌘+V error. My speculation is that after printing the labels for the 320GB disk nobody remembered to change the text for the 160GB version.

For reference MK3253GSX is 320GB and MK1653GSX is 160GB. In Apple’s world, both disks use MK3253GSX on the label, even though the correct number is shown when you check Disk Utility or About This Mac > System Information.

This wonky number business all came to a head ? when we were looking for replacement parts for one of these disks. We needed the double headed 160GB drive, not the four headed 320GB.

Mislabelled Apple Hard Drives MK3253GSX MK1653GSX

When I was trying to research this, I was quite suprised to find an old blog post of ours that shows the same problem with Hitachi drives manufactured around the same time. I’ve not found any other mention of this labelling fault, so thought I’d post it up here for future Mac Archaeologists to find.

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Advice

Stop using the hard drive as soon as possible. If the problem is getting worse then you may eventually lose access completely.

Don't download ANYTHING to the disk. It could write over the files you're trying to recover.

Don't try to scan, repair or fix any errors unless you have backups of the data. A failed repair process can damage the files beyond recovery.

Don't re-install or restore the computer unless you have backups of the data already. It may get the machine running again, but only in a factory-fresh way. Your data will be lost.

If you manage to access your files at any point, make a copy to another drive as soon as you can. It may be a fluke, and could be the last time you see the files. Don't reboot expecting to see them again.

If the files you need are really important then you should consider getting the disk professionally recovered. We've spent years making our process as safe as possible to maximise our chances of success.

If you decide to try your own recovery, keep a close watch on the time estimates. If the time keeps incrementing up it could be a sign of disk trouble. Failure to deal with that could cause the drive to fail completely, and beyond repair. A hard drive shouldn't take longer than a few hours to extract.